New evidence uncovered more than a year after Casey Anthony's acquittal

Published 7:54 AM EST Nov 21, 2012

ORLANDO, Fla. -

Prosecutors may have missed a crucial clue in the case against Casey Anthony.

Orlando sister station WESH 2 News reported Wednesday that investigators said the lead prosecutor in the case didn't know about certain evidence until after Anthony was acquitted of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in a case that gripped the nation for several years.

On the day the toddler died, someone in the home did a computer search using the words "foolproof suffocation," according to the WESH report that cited the Orange County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies said that when whomever in the house did the search, he or she misspelled "suffocation."

WESH legal analyst Richard Hornsby said the state would have had a better chance to convict Anthony had the evidence been discovered sooner.

"The words to describe there was a search that implicates Casey Anthony but no one found it stuns me -- best way to describe it," Hornsby said.

In his book, Anthony's attorney Jose Baez first revealed his computer expert found the Anthony computer suffocation search in a mirror image of the hard drive that the state provided.

A sheriff's official said investigators didn't find the search on that same hard drive, WESH reported.

Lead prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick confirmed she asked the Sheriff's Office to investigate Baez' claims and discovered they were true.

WESH reported that Burdick said she never asked investigators to search for the term "suffocation" specifically before or during the trial but that, "I asked for a full history of June 16, 2008, before trial. I have those emails."

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